Helen didn’t move from her bench until every one of them had left, none offering more than a quick glance in her direction. Even to her ears, Dror’s argument felt thin. The Jewish volunteers had chosen to give up safety too. Walter from Canada and Maria from Italy, and Avi who had been Abe and his fellow Americans, and of course David from London: all had left places where they could have had comfortable lives, and all planned to stay in Israel. For them, this volunteer stint was a way to launch their new lives as Israelis, tossing them headlong into a society where everyone had to be willing to pitch in because the coming of war was inevitable. They’d come here because, as she’d heard Avi say grimly to one of the other American volunteers, safety no longer had meaning for him once he knew how easily Jews could be murdered. They weren’t here, as Helen was, for a few months, a year, a rebellion en route to adulthood.
A week passed before it began. A week when Dror’s voice whispered her out of sleep in the hot, quiet barracks and he buttoned the blouse of her uniform with absurd care. A week of averted eyes even from the girls who had once been friendly to Helen; of silence when she carelessly splashed mop water onto the kitchen floor—the cook’s reprimands muted out of some uneasy respect for Dror. A week of tensions blanched invisible by the bright light of Dror—his smile upon seeing her, his touch like the courtship of something precious. She lay in the barracks beside him, the pulse visible in the skin of his neck, and her fear evaporated. Here she was at the center of things. Here she was, at last, where it was possible to lie naked and at rest, to look into the dark eyes of the man beside her and know they’d pledged each other the gift of truth. For the first time since childhood, she realized, she didn’t dread living in the world. She said it aloud in the still air of the barracks and listened to the two Hebrew words drop peacefully from her, like twin stones into the quiet desert: “I’m alive.”
She woke to Dror watching her. Instinctively she sat, pulling the rough blanket over her breasts.
“Do you know how many of us died?”
At first she thought she’d misheard.
“One out of three.” He spoke quietly but with an intensity she instantly feared. “One out of every three Jews in the world. In my country, in Poland, nine out of every ten of us died.”
She waited. He was watching her with an emotion she couldn’t identify. “Including your mother,” she said quietly. “And Nessa.”
He blinked. “Do you know how many of us died here just after that, in the war of independence? When we were attacked from five fronts?”
“Dror,” she said. “You sound like you’re making a speech.”
Dror stood, and she saw that he’d dressed while she slept. Slowly he paced before her, as though interrogating a suspect. Then he stopped. “I want you to know what you’re stepping into.”
She watched him.
Don’t forget I’ve lived through war too, she wanted to say, then was ashamed. She remembered little of the Blitz: her mother’s arm pulling a heavy curtain to shut out the blaring, wailing world; a confusion of green sliding past the train window; the smooth handle of her tagged suitcase and a kitten that lived in a garden shed and a large silent woman who’d already taken in three other children. The embarrassment of forgetting how to tie her shoe; the older girl who showed her how.
“What I’m talking about,” he began as though reading her thoughts, “isn’t just a war that begins and ends, Helen—and it’s something England can’t have prepared you for. You name a country, and I’ll tell you about a time it became obsessed with killing Jews. Do you know, in Russia the Nazis recruited local farmers to help drown Jews, before they settled on more efficient means. Thirty thousand in two days at Babi Yar.” He paused. “Drowning,” he said.
“Dror,” she said. “Stop.”
“I want you to try to imagine it.”
She stared at him.
“I imagine it,” he went on. “Drowning has to be done individually. Can you imagine what it takes to hold a child down by the hair, a woman, a man? And not for just a second, not the sort of thing you can do with a moment’s adrenaline before you have time to think about it. With drowning you have to hold”—his voice cracked. “You have to do it until the struggle for life has stopped.”
She did not want to imagine and couldn’t help it. She felt the tendons of her neck constrict. Near panic, she raised her palms to repel the horror—to repel him?
He sat down opposite her, so quietly he barely made a sound. “I need you to understand,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” she said.
He closed his eyes.
She sat opposite him, the blanket to her throat. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether she might be luring him into something wrong. Suddenly the softness of her own breasts, the warmth of her skin, seemed untrustworthy, as though they might lead him astray in a world that required hardness.
Pushing the thought away, she reached for him, and let the confusion bleed out of her. She thought, With this touch, and this and this. I lead you to me.
The following night, they crossed the endless open distance from the canteen to his quarters with his hand firmly holding hers. It was the first night they spent together in his room and they let themselves be seen entering the officers’ building together. Their lovemaking that night was slow and deliberate, a declaration. When they’d finished, she didn’t sleep. Outside, the black sky towered above the desert, the stars compounding to infinity. She watched Dror blink at the ceiling, his dark eyes bright.
On the firing range that week she dropped bullet casings into a sack, each making its muffled clink under the beating sun—her sweat trickling down her back and breastbone, the desert horizon with her always. There was no escaping the horizon. No softening it, or clouding what was real. This was why she was here—she’d struck the flint of it. This was why she’d had to leave England. She’d come here in order to be in a place where polite lies weren’t possible. And here was the reward—here was what she’d craved—a love synonymous with honesty. Hadn’t Dror brought the harshest truths and laid them before her? As spent casings slipped her fingers, she conjured his image on the empty plain: a man unbending, his heart somehow still willing. The promise she made to him was sewn like a sinew into her body: I will never lie to you.
When he handed her the dusty volume at the end of that week, she turned it away. “There’s no need for that, Dror,” she said.
They were in his room on the base. Another day off for both of them; she’d thought the timing a coincidence until Muriel shot a comment through the dark over Helen’s bunk about Dror the high and mighty who was rigging the volunteers’ schedule for his own pleasures. None of the other girls had answered. Other than Muriel, the soldiers avoided any mention of the situation, choosing to navigate around Helen during the daytime as though she were invisible. If they met her gaze at all it was with absolute neutrality. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some unspecified signal that would tell them the crisis had passed.
Now, in his room, dressed in his civilian clothing, Dror pressed the book into her hands. “I found it in Be’er Sheva,” he said. “I’ve been trying to explain in my own way, Helen, but—” He drew a long breath. “You’ve told me you love books. Maybe this is how you’ll understand.”
She stared at the title. The History of the Jewish People. She laughed aloud, deliberately, to show him she didn’t take his sober mood to heart. But when she glanced up his face was stern. He looked, for an instant, like the officer who’d given the grim welcome upon the volunteers’ arrival at the base.
She lifted a hand and saluted him.
He didn’t laugh. “This is important. I need you to know what you’re walking into.”
The book was used: its cover worn, the lettering of the title faded. “Do you understand how absurd this is, Dror?”
He didn’t answer.
“You want me to read Jewish history so I can decide whether to love you. But I already know,” she said, “I already know everything I need to know about that.”
He was silent. She’d known she would need to speak the words first.